Business Use Cases
Business Use Cases differ from the standard Use Case in that they do not describe a set of work by a system so much as a departments response to a Business Event.
When creating a business use case, the focus of the analysis should be from the outside in. This is to say that the Business Use Case should be determined as the response to some event triggered from outside the department (e.g. A student submits registration request to the registrar, a student pays their bill or a customer requests equipment for an event from the MRC). Each of these events should have a standard response from the Business Unit and by examining the response from the perspective of the outside entity, it becomes clearer how to partition the work within the system to maximize the efficiency and success of the overall process.
Another important factor in examining things from an outside perspective is that it reduces the chance of creating a "System" in a vacuum or perpetuating inefficient/legacy thinking into the next iteration. By thinking of the system from this higher, business process standpoint it is possible to question "Why do we do it this way?" and make potential improvements to the whole process not possible in a product-centric requirements gathering/analysis.